No Man's Sky Turns 10 With 99% of Its Planets Unseen

Ten Years, Forty Updates, and a Galaxy Still Mostly Unexplored

No Man's Sky hit its tenth anniversary this week — it launched on PS4 on August 9, 2016 in North America and August 10 in Europe — and Hello Games marked it with a thank-you from studio head Sean Murray and a tease for what comes next. The detail everyone has latched onto: after a decade of players wandering the galaxy, roughly 1% of the game's planets have been visited.

• Around 40 major free updates shipped since launch, none of them paid expansions
• Roughly 1% of planets discovered by players in ten years
• Highest player numbers since launch reached this year, per Murray
• A COSMOS update teased as the next major addition

That 1% figure is the kind of statistic that only makes sense for a procedurally generated universe, and it is a fitting way to mark the occasion. The galaxy was always going to outlast the players exploring it.

What Makes the Ten-Year Run Remarkable?

Forty major updates, all free, is the number that deserves the attention. Hello Games could have packaged any one of the larger ones — base building, multiplayer, the space station overhauls, the expedition system — as paid downloadable content and nobody would have blinked. Instead every addition landed as a free patch for everyone who owned the game.

That decision compounded. Each update brought lapsed players back, those returning players told other people, and the game accumulated a reputation for generosity that no marketing budget buys. Murray's note that this year has seen the highest player numbers since launch is the payoff: a decade in, the game is more played than it was at release.

It is also a genuinely useful case study for the industry. Sustained free post-launch support, delivered consistently over years, turns out to be a viable long-term strategy rather than merely an apology.

What Is the COSMOS Update?

Hello Games has confirmed COSMOS as the next major update without detailing what it contains. Based on the studio's pattern, expect a themed overhaul touching several systems at once rather than a single headline feature, and expect it free.

The studio also continues work on Light No Fire, its follow-up project, which Murray indicated is still in development alongside No Man's Sky support. Running an ongoing live game and a new title simultaneously is not a small ask for a studio of Hello Games' size, and the fact that update cadence has held up says something about how the team is organized.

Worth Jumping Back In?

If you bounced off No Man's Sky in 2016, the game you would load today shares a name with that one and not much else. Base building, settlements, fleets, underwater exploration, mechs, expeditions, and full multiplayer all arrived after launch. We covered The Swarm update and Expedition 22 back in June, which gives a sense of the scale a routine update reaches now.

Anniversary moments like this one are consistently the best time to return — the community is active, expeditions are running, and there are usually more people in the shared parts of the galaxy than at any other point in the year. We saw the same effect with Pokemon GO's tenth anniversary last month.

Ten years, forty free updates, 99% of a galaxy still waiting. That is a decent run. More releases and celebrations in our gaming coverage.

Sources: Video Games Chronicle — August 10, 2026; Xbox Wire — August 10, 2026.